Monday

Standing in the parking lot Tuesday outside a second floor apartment in St. Augustine Beach, Jenn LeBuff was home, but she didn’t want to go in.

“We don’t have anything,” she said, standing next to her car with her three young daughters strapped into car seats in the back. “Everything we have is in that house.”

The week before, she moved her whole family out of the apartment at 23 Schooner Court in Seaside Villas amid concerns of a mold infestation that she feared was making them all sick.

These days, she and her family are staying at a friend’s house a few miles away. She had driven back on Tuesday afternoon to meet with a code enforcement officer who was looking into her complaints.

As the official carried out his inspection, and in a phone call the day before, LeBuff recounted what happened.

She, her husband and her three daughters had moved in about three months earlier and almost immediately she started noticing problems with the apartment that was costing them $1349 a month in rent.

“I instantly saw a hole in the wall by the tub,” she said.

She put in a work order to get it repaired.

There was a problem with a crack or hole in the drywall near her bedroom window and what appeared to be a leak in the roof.

“I have like 10 work orders for three months,” LeBuff said.

Then, a little over a week ago, the property management company told LeBuff they needed access to the apartment to replumb the unit. That, she was told, was going to require the water being turned off for a time.

She said she was a bit perturbed that they didn’t offer to compensate her for the inconvenience, but she went along with the process.

When she and her family arrived home late on a Wednesday night after a day of plumbers working in and around the unit, she said she noticed that there were holes cut in the walls where people had been working but didn’t think much of it.

When her husband woke up later that night, “violently” throwing up, she assumed he had a stomach bug.

Then her daughter, early the next morning, also reported she wasn’t feeling well and started throwing up too.

“All of the sudden it hits me,” she said. “And I said, ‘Oh my gosh, get everybody out now.’”

Once the family was out, LeBuff said she went back in with the benefit of daylight and looked around.

She said she found mold inside the opened walls including a gooey substance on the back of one piece of drywall.

“It looked like an elephant sneezed,” she said.

Her concern at this point is that her family has been exposed to the mold from the first day they moved in, and that the problem was exacerbated when the plumbing work started.

“It’s not just that they exposed us to it,” she said. “It’s that they opened it up knowing they had a leak.”

In the report that she provided after the visit from St. Augustine Beach, the official noted that the unit has a “strong odor of mildew and/or musty smell” and that there are areas of “dark discoloration” on the drywall and adjoining studs apparent when looking through the holes cut into the drywall.

He also noted “multiple exterior deficits” to include missing window screens, damaged dryer vents, blocked air conditioning drains, and “derelict stairs and 2nd floor deck area,” as well as improper grounding of the water heater and that the windows have been “modified” due to damaged casings to prevent proper opening. Various areas of drywall in the ceilings and walls also showed signs of exposure to moisture.

“This unit presents with a questionable status concerning safety and health standards,” he wrote. “Those statement results, received from an interview with the tenant and in conjunction to those items described above during an inspection, present a precarious scenario that needs further investigation by other trained professionals to R/O the presence of mold. It has been documented though in another unit within the same structure, that mold was present (test performed via a credited lab) in the area of the common space between units. The extent of that presence cannot be determined by this report but is evident none the less.”

Those results have since been sent to the San Diego-based Pacifica SD Management, who owns and the manages the property through various companies with similar names that all share the same address.

Though city officials could not immediately provide that correspondence to The Record on Friday, it is not the first time the company has heard from the city of St. Augustine Beach.

And LeBuff is not the first tenant to call the media with concerns from within the complex.

In July 2016, The Record spoke with another family with similar issues just as the city was notifying Pacifica that the apartment they were living in had been deemed unsafe for occupancy.

In that case the family was moved to another unit and has since moved out of the complex.

But two months later, then-building official Gary Larson sent a letter to the company asking for access to all units amid concerns of mounting problems.

“In response to multiple complaints received by this office, site inspection(s) were performed at the request of occupants/tenants of your property(s) on numerous dates and noted a continuing condition(s) that requires your immediate attention,” the letter said. “There has been a long history of multiple Building and Code violations with related health concerns at this complex for some time, that has continued to multiply out of control.”

Many of the problems LeBuff now faces are echoes of the problems noted in Larson's letter.

Larson requested access to all units in the complex to inspect them for problems and bring them into compliance.

Reached for comment on Friday, the city’s new building official, Brian Law, said he is not sure what action followed that letter. Having started in his position with the city in December, Law said his office is aware of the problems at Seaside Villas and officials have been “monitoring the situation” and have managed to get the company to make some repairs.

Law said he knew that his office received a “couple” of complaints “a couple of months ago,” but without looking back at records could not say how many complaints his office has fielded since he took over Larson’s old job.

The onsite manager for Pacifica told The Record on Friday that she had been directed by her corporate office to decline comment for this story. A call to her regional manager the day before was not returned.

Where all of that leaves LeBuff and her family now is uncertain. They are still staying with friends and trying to piece together their next steps with a landlord who, she said, has been less than helpful through a difficult process of trying to determine her rights and what she needs to do to protect herself and her family.

“There is honestly no real help when something like this happens,” she said. “It’s crazy.”

She said she eventually found some help with the St. Johns County Legal Aid office and is now working on getting further mold testing done to verify what she already suspects and what has apparently been found in another unit, but she still sees no clear path or end in sight.

“I am just in this state of flux,” she said.

But, it’s that lack of help from Pacifica, that has really compounded the hurt and frustration of the problems she is facing.

“To not even say, ‘We are so sorry, we will put you up some place,” she said. “In reality they rented it to me in hazardous conditions. That’s so disgraceful, I don’t even know how people can sleep at night.”

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